Posts Tagged ‘personality defects’

If the works of any man could make his biographer write in exasperation as thus:“All the while I was writing the biography I had to fight off a revulsion that kept rising within me,” we know it has to be that of Fyodor Dosteovsky. Leo Tolstoy was in full agreement with Nicholas Strakhov, who was the biographer. Such classics as The Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and Brothers Karamazov have passed into our treasury of literature as supreme examples of the Russian genius.
Tolstoy a great author himself, ridiculed Dosteovsky’s exaggeration, his implausibility, inchoate style, his grammatical errors, his mania for peopling his imaginary universe with epileptics, alcoholics and paronoiacs. Tolstoy never did experience such ups and downs and sordidness as he did. Dosteovsky was sick in himself, who thought of himself noble and happy and yet lacked courage to see any further than himself. To quote his biographer again,” He was vicious, envious, depraved and spent his life in a state of emotional upheaval and exasperation that would have made him appear riidiculous had he not been so malicious and so intelligent.”
Where Mozart rose above the immediate circumstances over his disappointments and misery the Russian writer sank under, into lower depths. How much more sickening one can get than his boasting about his encounters with little girls and not having any repugnance over them? Once Turgeniev, the author of Fathers and Sons bristled at his confession and asked rather angrily why he was telling him that. “ I just wanted to show how I despise you,”was his answer. He rearranged his life however scabrous or demeaning it might have been, into works something that still have universal appeal.
Our life is real, transient realty to be precise, while such works as that of Dosteovsky or Kafka fall within the realm of supra-reality that we can accept as self-evident. Can we explain reasonably why a bright child of three suddenly fall victim to cancer? Or a child, an apple of the eye of its parents see before their eyes fall a victim of hit and run case? Try explain it in a way its parents can understand. (Reprint)
benny